Jungle Peace Part 1

Jungle Peace.

by William Beebe.

NOTE

With three exceptions these chapters have appeared in the pages of _The Atlantic Monthly_, and I publish them through the kindness of the Editor, Ellery Sedgwick. "Hoatzins at Home" is adapted from a t.i.tle in my _Tropical Wild Life_, Volume I, published by the New York Zoological Society, which deals with the more technical results of study at the Research Station. The ill.u.s.trations are from my own photographs, except the frontispiece and those facing pages 162, 186, and 268, which were taken by Paul G. Howes. All the chapters dealing with the jungle relate to Bartica District, British Guiana, except X, which refers to Para at the mouth of the Amazon.

FOREWORD

Mr. Beebe's volume is one of the rare books which represent a positive addition to the sum total of genuine literature. It is not merely a "book of the season" or "book of the year"; it will stand on the shelves of cultivated people, of people whose taste in reading is both wide and good, as long as men and women appreciate charm of form in the writings of men who also combine love of daring adventure with the power to observe and vividly to record the things of strange interest which they have seen.

Nothing like this type of book was written until within the last century and a half. Books of this kind can only be produced in a refined, cultivated, civilized society. In rude societies there may be much appreciation of outdoor life, much fierce joy in hunting, much longing for adventurous wandering, but the appreciation and joy are inarticulate; for in such societies the people who write are generally not the people who act, and they express emotions by words as conventional as Egyptian hieroglyphics. In the popular poetry which has come down to us from early times, in the ballads of Britain and France, and the folk songs of the Russian and Turkish steppes, there are occasional lines which bring before us the song birds in Spring, in the merry greenwood, or the great flocks of water fowl on the ponds of the plains of green gra.s.s; but they are merely a few words of incidental description of the land through which the hero rides to foray and battle. We do not pa.s.s much beyond this stage even with Chaucer and the Minnesingers; and although the heroes of the Nibelungenlied were mighty hunters, those who described their deeds knew nothing of the game, even of their own forests. There were sovereigns of Nineveh whose devotion to the bolder forms of the chase was a pa.s.sion; and Kings and Queens of Memphis and Thebes who with absorbed and intelligent curiosity sought for information about the life of far-off lands; but their laborious writings, if they did not deal with business contracts, were generally concerned only with boastful annals or religious ritual.

Hitherto there have been only two periods of Western history in which both the art of expression, and the breadth of interest among cultivated men, grew to a point which permitted the cultivated man to turn back to the life of the open which his inarticulate ancestor had gradually abandoned, and to enjoy, appreciate, and describe it.

One of these periods included the society which enjoyed Theocritus and the society which applauded the country poems of Virgil. The other includes our own time, and may roughly be said to have begun when the rise of writers like Pope showed that English eighteenth century society had at last regained the level of the ancient society which enjoyed Cicero and Horace and Pliny; in France the advance had been more rapid.

It was not until the end of the eighteenth century that there appeared (in primitive form, of course, as with all early types) "nature books"

and books of natural history, big game hunting and adventures in out-of-the-way lands. In the Middle Ages there had been many "beastiaries," in which the natural history was for the most part fabulous; and many French and German, and some Italian, Spanish, and English hunting books, which were for the most part as stiff and technical as treatises on farriery.

But Bruce and Le Vaillant at last foreshadowed the wilderness--wanderers, half explorers, half big game hunters, of our own day; with Gilbert White, there appeared the first book of literary work by a stay-at-home lover of nature and natural history; and a century ago Waterton's "Wanderings" marked the beginning of the literature wherein field naturalists who are also men of letters and men of action have described for us the magic and interest, the terror and beauty of the far-off wilds where nature gives peace to bold souls and inspires terror in the mind.

Gilbert White and Waterton added in new ways to the sum of achievement of men of letters. Each made a contribution to literature as new and distinctive as the Idylls of Theocritus--it is not necessary to compare the worth of two kinds of literary work, and in speaking of Theocritus I am making no such comparison, but merely indicating that literature may be literature even although of a totally new type. The new literature, of appreciative love of nature and of hardy outdoor life, will appeal only to the never very extensive cla.s.s which neither ignorantly believes that literature is purely an affair of the lamp and the library, nor ignorantly proclaims its own shortcomings and conceit by boasting that it does not value books because, forsooth, it is too "red-blooded" to care for anything except action. A really first-cla.s.s hunting book, for instance, ought to be written by a man of prowess and adventure, who is a fair out-of-doors naturalist; who loves nature, who loves books, and who possesses the gift of seeing what is worth seeing and of portraying it with vivid force and yet with refinement. Such men are rare; and it is not always easy for them to command an audience.

In his own much larger field Mr. Beebe is just such a man; and he has such marked ability that he can make and command his audience. Exactly as John Burroughs is the man who has carried to its highest point of development the school in which Gilbert White was the first scholar, so Beebe is the man who has turned into a new type of higher literature the kind of work first produced by Waterton.

Nothing of this kind could have been done by the man who was only a good writer, only a trained scientific observer, or only an enterprising and adventurous traveler. Mr. Beebe is not merely one of these, but all three; and he is very much more in addition. He possesses a wide field of interest; he is in the truest sense of the word a man of broad and deep cultivation. He cares greatly for n.o.ble architecture and n.o.ble poetry; for beautiful pictures and statues and finely written books. Nor are his interests only concerned with nature apart from man and from the works of man. He possesses an extraordinary sympathy with and understanding of mankind itself, in all its myriad types and varieties.

In this book, and in his other recent writing (for I wish to draw a sharp line in favor of what he has recently written as compared with his earlier and more commonplace work), some of his most interesting descriptions are of the wild folk he meets in the wilderness--black or yellow, brown or red--and of some nominally tamer folk with whom he has foregathered in civilization.

I don't know in which category, civilization or savagery, the trenches at the front ought to come; but Mr. Beebe, a man of deeds as well as of books, knows the trenches and the people in them, and the pathetic or pitiful or else wholly brave and admirable people back of them; and his sketches of some of them and of their deeds and of the by-products of war as waged today are wholly admirable. Lowell, praising the Elizabethans as both doers and writers, spoke of Ben Jonson's having trailed a pike in the lowlands, and of Kenelm Digby's having ill.u.s.trated a point in physics by the effects of the concussion of the guns in the sea fight in which he took part off Scanderoon. Beebe, as bomber, has sailed in planes over the German lines; in company with a French officer he has listened to a wolf howl just back of the fighting front; he has gone with Iroquois Indians into the No Man's Land between the trenches of the mightiest armies the world has ever seen.

This volume was written when the writer's soul was sick of the carnage which has turned the soil of Northern France into a red desert of horror. To him the jungle seemed peaceful, and the underlying war among its furtive dwellers but a small thing compared to the awful contest raging among the most highly civilized of the nations of mankind. It is the same feeling that makes strong men, who have sickened of the mean and squalid injustice of so much of life in the centres of material progress, turn with longing to the waste places where no paths penetrate the frowning or smiling forests and no keels furrow the lonely rivers.

The jungle he herein describes is that of Guiana; and in the introductory chapters he gives cameos of what one sees sailing southward through the lovely islands where the fronds of the palms thrash endlessly as the warm trade blows. He knows well and intimately Malaysia and the East Indian islands, and Ceylon and Farther India and mid-China and the stupendous mountain ma.s.ses of the Himalayas. All of these he will some time put before us, in volumes not one of which can be spared from the library of any man who loves life and literature. This is the first of these volumes. In it are records of extraordinary scientific interest, in language which has all the charm of an essay of Robert Louis Stevenson. He tells of bird and beast and plant and insect; of the hoatzin, a bird out of place in the modern world, a bird which comes down unchanged from a time when birds merely fluttered instead of flying--and had only recently learned to flutter instead of gliding.

Whatever he touches he turns into the gold of truth rightly interpreted and vividly set forth--as witness his extraordinary account of the sleeping parlor of certain gorgeous tropic b.u.t.terflies.

If I had s.p.a.ce I would like to give an abstract of the whole book. As it is I merely advise all who love good books, very good books, at once to get this book of Mr. Beebe.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT.

Reprinted from the _New York Times_. REVIEW OF BOOKS.

I

JUNGLE PEACE

After creeping through slime-filled holes beneath the shrieking of swift metal, after splashing one's plane through companionable clouds three miles above the little jagged, hero-filled ditches, and dodging other sudden-born clouds of nauseous fumes and blasting heart of steel; after these, one craves thoughts of comfortable hens, sweet apple orchards, or ineffable themes of opera. And when nerves have cried for a time 'enough' and an unsteady hand threatens to turn a joy stick into a sign post to Charon, the mind seeks amelioration--some symbol of worthy content and peace--and for my part, I turn with all desire to the jungles of the tropics.

If one looks the jungle straight in the face and transcribes what is seen, there is evolved technical science, and until this can be done with accuracy and discretion, one can never feel worthy now and then, of stealing quietly up a side aisle of the great green wonderland, and, as I have done in these pages, looking obliquely at all things, observing them as actors and companions rather than as species and varieties; softening facts with quiet meditation, leavening science with thoughts of the sheer joy of existence. It should be possible occasionally to achieve this and yet to return to science enriched and with enthusiasm, and again to play some little part in the great physical struggle--that wonderful strife which must give to future peace and contentment new appreciation, a worthier enjoyment.

It is possible to enter a jungle and become acutely aware of poison fang and rending claw--much as a pacifist considers the high adventure of righteous war. But it is infinitely more wonderful and altogether satisfying to slip quietly and receptively into the life of the jungle, to accept all things as worthy and reasonable; to sense the beauty, the joy, the majestic serenity of this age-old fraternity of nature, into whose sanctuary man's entrance is unnoticed, his absence unregretted.

The peace of the jungle is beyond all telling.

II

SEA-WRACK

Suspended in the naked air eight thousand feet above New York, I look down and see the city and its inhabitants merged into one. From this height the metropolis is less interesting and hardly more noticeable than many tropical ants' nests which have come under my observation.

Circling slowly earthward, I have watched the city split apart into its canyon streets, and have finally distinguished the caterpillars which I knew were trains, and the black beetles which must be automobiles. Last, and apparently least, were resolved a mult.i.tude of tiny specks, weird beings all hats and legs, which were undoubtedly the makers and owners of these beetles and worms and canyons.

In many similar bird's-eye-views of the city one phase of activity always amuses and thrills. Circling as low as I dare, b.u.mped and jolted by the surging uprush of invisible spouts of warm air, I head, like a frigate-bird, straight into the teeth of the wind and hang for a time parallel with the streaming lines of gray and white smoke. Near the margin of the city where the glittering water reaches long fingers in between the wharves, a crowd of people push, antwise, down to the brink.

Many burdened individuals pa.s.s and repa.s.s over slender bridges or gang-planks, for all the world like leaf-cutting ants transporting their booty over twigs and gra.s.s stems. Then comes a frantic waving of antennae, (or are they handkerchiefs), and finally part of the wharf detaches itself and is slowly separated from the city. Now I can mount higher to a less dangerous alt.i.tude and watch the ship become a drifting leaf, then a floating mote, to vanish at last over a curve of the world.

I cease chuckling into the roar of my motor; my amus.e.m.e.nt becomes all thrill. The G.o.ds shift and change: Yoharneth-Lahai leaves me, and in his place comes Slid, with the hand of Roon beside me on the wheel. I hasten hangarwards with the gulls which are beating towards their roosting sands of far Long Island beaches.

On some future day I in my turn, scurry up a gang-plank laden with my own particular bundles, following days of haste and nights of planning.

I go out on the upper deck of the vessel, look upward at a gull and think of the amusing side of all the fuss and preparation, the farewells, the departure, which sufficient perspective gives. And then I look ahead, out toward the blue-black ocean, and up again to the pa.s.sing gulls, and the old, yet ever new thrill of travel, of exploration, possesses me. Even if now the thrill is shared by none other, if I must stand alone at the rail watching the bow dip to the first swell outside the harbor, I am yet glad to be one of the ants which has escaped from the turmoil of the great nest, to drift for a while on this tossing leaf.

At the earnest of winter--whether biting frost or flurry of snowflakes--a woodchuck mounts his little moraine of trampled earth, looks about upon the saddening world, disapproves, and descends to his long winter's sleep. An exact parallel may be observed in the average pa.s.senger. As the close perspective of home, of streets, of terrestrial society slips away, and his timid eyes gaze upon the unwonted sight of a horizon--a level horizon un.o.bstructed by any obstacles of man's devising, mental and physical activity desert him: he hibernates. He swathes himself, larva-like--in many wrappings, and encases himself in the angular coc.o.o.ns furnished for the purpose at one dollar each by the deck steward; or he haunts the smoking room, and under the stimulus of unaccustomed beverages enters into arguments at levels of intelligence and logic which would hardly tax the powers of Pithecanthropus or a Bushman.

From the moment of sailing I am always impressed with the amusing terrestrial instincts of most human beings. They leave their fellows and the very wharf itself with regret, and no sooner are they surrounded by old ocean than their desires fly ahead to the day of freedom from this transitory aquatic prison. En route, every thought, every worry, every hope is centripetal. The littlenesses of ship life are magnified to subjects of vital importance, and so perennial and enthusiastic are these discussions that it seems as if the neighbor's accent, the daily dessert, the sempiternal post-mortem of the bridge game, the home life of the stewardess, must contain elements of greatness and goodness. With a few phonograph records it would not be a difficult matter to dictate in advance a satisfactory part in the average conversation at the Captain's table. The subjects, almost without exception, are capable of prediction, the remarks and points of view may be antic.i.p.ated.

Occasionally a pa.s.senger detaches his mind from the ship and its doings long enough to take note of something happening beyond the rail--some cosmic phenomenon which he indicates with unerring finger as a beautiful sunset, frequently rea.s.suring himself of our recognition by a careful enumeration of his conception of the colors. Or a school of dolphins undulates through two mediums, and is announced, in a commendably Adam-like, but quite inaccurate spirit, as porpoises or young whales.

Mercury, setting laggardly in the west, is gilded anew by our informant as a lightship, or some phare off Cape Imagination. We shall draw a veil or go below, when an "average citizen" begins to expound the stars and constellations.

All this is only amusing, and with the limited interest in the ship and the trip which the usual pa.s.senger permits himself, he still derives an amazing amount of pleasure from it all. It is a wonderful child-like joy, whether of convincingly misnaming stars, enthusiastically playing an atrocious game of shuffle-board, or estimating the ship's log with methods of cunning mathematical accuracy, but hopeless financial results. All these things I have done and shall doubtless continue to do on future voyages, but there is an additional joy of striving to break with precedent, to concentrate on the alluring possibilities of new experiences, new discoveries, on board ship.

If the vessel is an oasis in a desert, or in a "waste of waters" as is usually announced at table about the second or third day out, then I am a true Arab, or, to follow more closely the dinner simile, a Jonah of sorts, for my interest is so much more with the said waste, or the things in it and above it, than with my swathed, hibernating fellow mortals.

Precedent on board ship is not easily to be broken, and much depends on the personality of the Captain. If he has dipped into little-known places all over the world with which you are familiar, or if you show appreciation of a Captain's point of view, the battle is won. A few remarks about the difficulty of navigation of Nippon's Inland Sea, a rebuke of some thoughtless idiot at table who hopes for a storm; such things soon draw forth casual inquiries on his side, and when a Captain begins to ask questions, the freedom of the chart-room is yours, and your unheard-of requests which only a naturalist could invent or desire, will not fail of fulfilment.

I am off on a voyage of two weeks to British Guiana and I begin to ponder the solution of my first problem. The vessel plows along at a ten-knot rate, through waters teeming with interesting life and stopping at islands where every moment ash.o.r.e is of thrilling scientific possibility. By what means can I achieve the impossible and study the life of this great ocean as we slip rapidly through it--an ocean so all-encompa.s.sing, yet to a pa.s.senger, so inaccessible.

Day after day I scan the surface for momentary glimpses of cetaceans, and the air for pa.s.sing sea birds. Even the rigging, at certain seasons, is worth watching as a resting place for migrating birds. The extreme bow is one of the best points of vantage, but the spot of all spots for an observer is the appropriately named crow's nest, high up on the foremast. You have indeed won the Captain over to your bizarre activities when he accords permission to climb the swaying ratlines and heave yourself into that wonderful place. It is tame enough when compared with piloting a plane among the clouds, but it presents an enormous expanse of ocean compared with the humble deck view. Here you can follow the small whales or blackfish down and down long after they have sounded; with your binoculars you can see every detail of the great floating turtles. And when the sun sinks in glory which is terrible in its grandeur, you may let it fill your senses with wordless ecstasy, without fear of interpretive interruption. Save for the other matchstick mast and the spider-web ratlines, the horizon is unbroken.